Digger

Let’s get one thing straight: most movies are worth watching.

That isn’t my critical judgment. It’s yours. I just fucking work here.

Hollywood remains a profitable American-ish business without anyone standing outside AMC begging you to buy local. Studios may chase tax credits across half the planet and most of Louisiana, but that’s optimization, not life support.

Streaming muddies the sample. The Services produce content littered with performances so phoned-the-fuck-in that antitrust law may eventually have to rediscover its ancestral purpose and break up this reconstituted Bell monopoly.

Some of these “experiences” are less pleasant than passing a kidney stone in a Coachella port-a-potty. We nevertheless keep paying for them.

The corollary to all that sludge in our stream is that the multiplex has become a much narrower funnel. Following the great indoorsing, a wide theatrical release is less Hollywood’s default distribution setting than an anointment: a movie has enough spectacle, cultural currency, or sheer fucking novelty to be uncommonly worth it, even when it isn’t critically so.

The old ecosystem had a useful garbage chute—our lord and quality savior, the STRAIGHT TO DVD sticker—and the modern one has virtually flipped the script to engrave a STRAIGHT TO RELEVANCE hologram beneath the ticket QR code.

You didn’t personally award that merit badge. But collectively, we keep ratifying the committee that did.

And I’m not dragging you through all this merely to execute the tritest critical riff on a movie called Digger imaginable. Taking digs at anyone would require me to be aware of the intermediate settings on the hostility dial.

I grind your gears out of love.

Having sat on this review for a few extra days, I’ve had the benefit of watching a real gap emerge between the critical and audience reactions to Digger. Not having a death wish, I don’t have some fervent declaration about which camp has seen the light. I merely offer an alternative lens for deciding whether you buy a ticket: you already decided you should.

That said, let me tell you what to think.

Digger is like a Zillow listing describing a room with six chandeliers, leopard carpet, and an in-floor jacuzzi as “eclectic maximalism.” Sometimes a mess just has a media consultant.

Cruise is the load-bearing wall.

Tom Cruise deserved an Oscar before this thing hit theaters. And I mean a real one.

Young TC was choice. Looking at you A Few Good Men, Born on the Fourth of July, Risky Business. And he didn’t become an off-speed specialist with age—Magnolia, Collateral, Eyes Wide Shut. Then he spent the better part of a decade throwing himself from aircraft and architecturally significant tall buildings to demonstrate that fine lines and mortality weren’t coming for him. Somewhere along the way, the mission did the impossible and obscured a basic fact—the lion could still act.

In Digger, somebody finally opens the cage.

Cruise arrives with more voltage than even heavyweight director Alejandro G. Iñárritu seems able to ground, and the movie repeatedly threatens to start an electrical fire within its fourth wall.

The problem isn’t a lack of firepower. John Goodman and Jesse Plemons—two bottomless reserves of supporting-actor gravity—are exclusively deployed to pour more gasoline on the stage when they’ve so clearly got the nuanced range to ground the thing while still joining in on the fun.

The film’s structural twist is, at first blush, too clever, but it may also be what keeps Digger upright. In the moment, it feels like one more violent wobble from a story already balancing too much shit on too small a cart. Then the movie settles, and the Hail Mary begins to read, appropriately, as a bath in holy water: not as another flourish, but as an exorcism of the frenetic pageantry that preceded it.

What it all yields is a question that critical commentary is so damn sure it’s got to answer that we forget the timeless two-part test that films like this can be judged by: is the movie good, and—as a separate question—is there enough going on inside the damn thing to make seeing it worthwhile?

Digger makes the first one complicated. On the second, the needle is buried deep into yes.

For ol’ Seamus, once the second column pegs the meter hard enough to start clipping, I tend to call it a review.